The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

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  Censorship in Havana has been so strict lately that a newspaper advertisement for a watch was banned not long ago because the celebrity shown wearing it was a bearded explorer, and every Cuban knows that Castro has a beard (or did have; the story now goes that since the capture of a crate of razors he and his men have been clean-shaven). The news from Oriente Province is heavily censored, and on the rare occasions when the Sierra Maestra is referred to at all, it is usually called, with sly irony, “a certain mountain range.” This absence of news has, of course, favored the spread of spectacular rumors. Some weeks ago, well before the most recent flareup in Santiago, where I had spent some time back in 1939, I inquired about what was going on there, and heard such sombre tales of nightly street battles in the city and of a countryside given over to chaos and terror that I decided to go and see for myself. None of the taxi-drivers I talked to would agree to make the trip, and after listening to their stories of wholesale arson and murder in Santiago, I was rather surprised to learn that Cubana Airlines still ran a daily service there. I booked passage on a non-stop flight that left early in the evening, and when I arrived at the Havana airport, the plane, a brand-new four-engine turboprop Viscount, stood waiting on the tarmac, floodlit and under heavy guard. There was half an hour’s delay while several parcels brought aboard by the other passengers—there were just four—were untied and found to contain no bombs, and then we took off.

  Cuba is one of the gayest of countries to fly over at night. From ten thousand feet, there were always half a dozen brilliantly lit small towns in sight below, scattered over the countryside in a regular pattern, like sparkling modernistic trinkets on the black earth, each with its square-cut central jewel of a plaza. Toward the end of the five-hundred-mile run, with the lights of Santiago ahead and the foothills of the Sierra Maestra off to the right below, I could see a tiny ringworm of fire glowing in the blackness. My fellow-passengers said it was no doubt a burning cane field. (A short time before, Castro had announced that unless Batista resigned, he would burn the cane all over the island as it stood in the fields ready for cutting. “A sugar harvest without Batista, or Batista without a sugar harvest,” the slogan went.) A few minutes later, we landed and were hustled into an airport bus, to be driven at a rocking, tire-screeching seventy miles an hour into the center of town. It was now half past nine, and the driver explained to me that when there was to be trouble, the zero hour was inevitably ten o’clock, at which time all the town’s lights might be cut off by the insurgents. With half an hour to go, the streets were still ablaze, and small groups of citizens clustered at their doors, like gophers ready to bolt for the shelter of their burrows when the shadow of an eagle fell upon them. Under lamps hung like moons among blossoming trees, other citizens were still performing the decorous ritual of the evening promenade—the women circling the square in one direction and the men in the other. My hotel was on the Parque de Céspedes, in a theatrical setting of ancient colonial buildings. The feeling of being in a theatre was heightened by a row of substantial burghers who sat sipping their Daiquiris along the edge of the hotel veranda. As the cathedral clock struck ten, the promenaders trooped out of the square, as if at the completion of a scene, and on the terrace we waited in our privileged seats to see if more sinister performers would come out on the empty stage. A waiter told me there had been a good deal of shooting the previous night. One of the hotel guests had been caught in the suburbs in the blackout, and had spent half the night under his car while bullets flew in all directions around him. But tonight everything was quiet. At intervals of about half an hour, an Army truck bristling with guns rumbled through the square, but no snipers appeared on the rooftops. One by one, the guests got tired of waiting and took themselves reluctantly off to bed.

  It was a relief to find, the next morning, that the gracious old town of Santiago hadn’t changed much since I was last there. Neglect and comparative poverty have thus far stemmed the encroachment of the insipid modernism that is fast taking over Havana, and have preserved the near-perfect Céspedes Park and many of the surrounding old houses, with their deep balconies and their enormous, airy rooms, whose ceilings are supported, like Moorish council chambers, by numerous spare and elegant columns. I noted that although the hotel’s vast baroque dining room had been defaced by an American-style quick-lunch counter, the huge old Valencian chandeliers, with their bunches of scaly glass flowers, which had survived so many bullets and earthquakes, were still there. The cracks opened in the towers of the Florentine-style cathedral by the 1929 earthquake were only just being filled in.

  By day, life went on in Santiago much as usual, although the authorities had thought it wise to remove all the police—even those normally employed on traffic duty—from the streets. A stubbornly festive air hung over the city. Whole barbecued pigs, paraded on wheelbarrows, were rapidly being reduced to sandwiches for consumption on the spot. Many of the shops were decorated with elaborate colored-paper models of airplanes, Colt revolvers, and battleships. The hairdressers were doing a fast trade in de-kinking the hair of the city’s fashionable mulatas, and there was an all-pervasive background moan of jukeboxes playing barely recognizable American hit tunes. The Cuban obsession with the occult and the pseudo-occult sciences came out more strongly here than in Havana. A department store had a window display of books devoted solely to the significance of numbers. Fortune-telling slot machines abounded. A market stall was heaped with cult objects of Saint Barbara, who has been identified by a Cuban sect known as the Santeros with the African god Chango. And consultorios espirituales, with peso-a-trance mediums in attendance, were almost as numerous as barbershops.

  Most of the citizens of Santiago appeared to be sympathetic to Castro’s cause, not only because he was out to free the whole of Cuba from the dictatorship but because, rightly or wrongly, he symbolized for them the resistance of Oriente Province to what they saw as its exploitation and its neglect by the central authority. I paid a visit to a wealthy local businessman, who openly admitted contributing generously to the war chest of the Castro rebellion. He received me in a cool, palm-shaded patio and presented me with a new aspect of the problem. “It’s really all the fault of the English,” he said. “I mean your pirates, in the old days. We had to build the city in a low-lying position, where we hoped it wouldn’t be seen from the sea. Not that that helped in the long run—your people still managed to sack it half a dozen times. But if the place hadn’t turned out so unhealthy, Santiago would have been the capital, not Havana. As things are, we’re quite neglected. Oriente is the richest province in Cuba, but all the money goes into the pockets of those gangsters in Havana. Naturally, we’re for Castro to a man. What can you expect?”

  Castro and his merry men were lurking somewhere in the five hundred square miles of almost unexplored mountain territory that begins just across Santiago Bay. At night, his partisans all over the province were going into the cane fields and planting candles whose bases were wrapped in kerosene-soaked rags. There was a great shortage of food in the mountains, and little water, except for the rank fluid stored in certain tropical plants, so the rebels were renewing their supplies by constant raids on the towns in the vicinity. The most effective troops in use against them on the government side were the rurales, a hard-hitting body of men originally formed by one of the early United States occupation forces and steeped in the tradition of shooting first and then asking questions. The rurales, I was told, prefer not to take prisoners, and spare no one who is even suspected of being associated with the rebels. Two doctors who were believed to have treated Castro’s wounded had just been murdered by the rurales, and this had led to an outraged protest to the Batista government from the World Medical Association.

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  Despite all the sensational forecasts, it soon became clear that I was unlikely to see any action in Santiago just then, and when, after mooching about its peaceful streets for two days, I received a tip from a rebel sympathizer that an uprising
was expected hourly in the town of Manzanillo, about a hundred miles to the west, I hired a taxi—without any difficulty—and drove there. The countryside I drove through was the wonderfully unspoiled Cuba of the last century—or perhaps even the century before. The peasants still built their huts of palm fronds, in the style of the bohios of the long-exterminated Siboney Indians, and surrounded them with bowerbird decorations of colored rocks. We passed through tangerine-scented tropical versions of the American frontier towns of the 1850s, with swinging-door saloons, hitching posts, and gun-toting cowboys on white ponies. Two men out of three were going about with fighting cocks tucked under their arms. They fed these birds on scraps of meat and tidbits of hard-boiled eggs soaked in rum, and carried them around mostly for their companionship, it appeared, since cockfights were held only on weekends, in structures built like miniature bull rings, which stood on the outskirts of all the villages. At one crossroads, a distraught-looking female cartomancer had planted herself, to tell fortunes at twenty centavos a clip. Cartomancy is regarded in Cuba as the lowest grade of prediction, and the gloomy cowboys who were this woman’s customers flung down their coins and received her austere prognostications without even bothering to dismount. The hills in this area were covered with a light haze from burning fields of sugar cane. Once, we passed a field where a fire had just been put out; the dry grass around its edges was still flaring with the sizzling noise of bacon frying in a pan.

  The first guardia rural who stopped us, at the small town of Veguitas, was a memorable figure. He was dressed like an American cavalryman of the 1914–18 war, with breeches, leggings, and a Scoutmaster’s hat, and he sat under a canopy by the roadside, on an elegant chair upholstered in tooled leather. He held a large automatic pistol in one hand, a tommy gun lay across his knees, and there was a bottle of beer at his side. This proved to be the first of eight such encounters that day, and in one of them—at Bayamo, where everyone predicted freely that a rebel strike was imminent—my luggage was dragged out of the taxi to be searched. This time, it was a pair of consciously tough, swaggering soldiers, members of a whole class of ne’er-do-wells who receive a week or two of training and then, with a gun in their hands and a hundred dollars a month to spend, are let loose upon the countryside. They put on a great show of fury when they found a khaki shirt in my suitcase—apparently it is illegal in Cuba for a civilian to possess such a garment—and one advised the other, in a rattle of slurred Spanish, to “let him have it” if I talked back. At this moment, I remembered only too well that civil rights had been suspended, and that during a tense period a few months previously an N.B.C. man had been flung into jail for eight hours merely because he had had the bad luck to be travelling in the neighborhood at the time. In the end, however, the soldiers let me go, and I reached Manzanillo, which is down on the coast and right under the brow of the Sierras. Here it was perfectly clear, from the sandbag parapets and the manned strong points, that the Army was ready for anything. A uniformed patrol was searching the houses facing the square when I got there, and as soon as I took out my camera, a rifle was levelled at me. I decided that secrecy was not Castro’s forte.

  The attack came, all right, but it was not at Manzanillo, or at Bayamo, or even at Santiago, as had been variously predicted, but at Veguitas, where the guardia rural in the antique cavalryman’s outfit had stopped me. A convoy of attackers had descended on the town, and I wondered whether he had tried to intercept them, and what had happened to him. The account I heard was that the Castro men first silenced the opposition and then went around among the stores, loading four trucks with supplies. What is characteristic of this rebellion, although remarkably out of line with tradition, is that the raiders seem actually to pay for all they take, and I felt sure that a proportion of the money they put down in Veguitas had come from my friend the Santiago businessman. It was beginning to look to me as though, in spite of all the early failures, Castro’s strategy was more successful than I had supposed, and as though, if the present Cuban dictatorship could perhaps hold out for a long time, Castro might contrive to hold out even longer.

  A NOTE BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

  ISTORY IS WRITTEN by the victors,” Winston Churchill supposedly said, which is a version of the argument that scientists would make a generation later about memory. What we recall, from a given moment or period, is not a videotape of what we actually experienced, pristinely stored in our mental archive. It is a memory overlaid with what we were later told or saw or read, to the point where the initial memory has been revised—often without our realizing it—a thousand times. History is written in the editing room: the victor controls postproduction. Keep that in mind when you read what follows. This is not the 1950s. It is The New Yorker’s 1950s, and the reason you are reading it is that The New Yorker won.

  Think about what you know about that decade. Some of you lived through it, but that, the memory experts tell us, has made your recollections all the more subject to post-hoc revision. Many of us were born after it, and for us the problem is much worse. What we do know? Maybe we saw North by Northwest and remember that scene where Cary Grant—or was it Jimmy Stewart?—had his secretary bring him his messages while he went for a martini at the Plaza. People drank a lot in the 1950s—or, at least, Madison Avenue advertising executives did, or at least Madison Avenue advertising executives did as imagined by squat, balding, middle-aged British directors who may never have set foot inside a Madison Avenue agency. My elemental 1950s memory was reading Henry Gregor Felsen’s 1953 teen masterpiece, Street Rod, in rural Canada as a child, which convinced me that, just two decades earlier, the United States was swarming with sixteen-year-olds driving tricked-out roadsters down dusty Midwestern highways at ridiculous speeds. I waited, impatiently, for 1970s Canada to catch up with 1950s America on this particular front. (I’m still waiting.) Felsen, by the way, was the son of Harry and Sabina Felsen of Brooklyn. My vision of the 1950s, in other words, was constructed in southwest Ontario in the 1970s out of the Midwestern fantasies of a Depression-era kid from New York City, whose actual experiences with motorized transport as a seventeen-year-old were probably confined to streetcars and the Q train from Flatbush. We are what we read. It’s probably better that way.

  So what do these brief vignettes tells us about The New Yorker’s 1950s? The twenty-one shorts that follow are drawn largely from The Talk of the Town, which establishes the tenor, although some are excerpts from full-scale stories. By design, they give us a magical, crisply imagined decade that takes place on the island of Manhattan, or on the way to Manhattan—as when Lillian Ross catches up with Ernest Hemingway at the baggage claim at Idlewild. This was the fifties: Kennedy was still a senator and not yet an airport. We get an unforgettable portrait of Toots Shor, whose roost—the restaurant Toots Shor’s—was at 51 West Fifty-first Street, eight blocks from the New Yorker offices, on Forty-third. Geoffrey Hellman catches up with Frank Lloyd Wright at the Plaza, at Fifty-ninth and Fifth Avenue, where the architect talks a blue streak. There is Mort Sahl at “the apartment of a friend of ours.” (Could it be anywhere but the Upper West Side?) And there’s Pat Weaver at the NBC building in Rockefeller Center, and Leonard Bernstein at Carnegie Hall on Fifty-seventh.

  The New Yorker as a whole has long been a place that rewards the adventurous streak in its writers. Mississippi is good; Bolivia, better. (And if you’ve got someone who goes from Mississippi to Bolivia and then, after an emotional catharsis of some sort, back again, so much the better.) But The Talk of the Town is the talk of the town: it follows the ideology of the city’s alternate-side parking rules, which decree that parked cars be moved each day from one side of the street to the other. Travel, in parking terms, is measured in street crossings. That is the rule of the front section of the magazine, and the 1950s, through that prism, is an intimate place. “It was over five years ago that we paid a call on the International Business Machines Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator,” one story begins, “in I.B.M. World Headquarters, at Fifty-seventh
and Madison.” Or: “We marched over to the building housing the firm’s electronic laboratory, at 475 Tenth Avenue.” Marched! Not even a cab was necessary. As Freud might have put it (had Freud lived on Broadway, not Berggasse), the stories in this section are attuned to the narcissism of small distances.

  And that, of course, is their great charm. Our own times are chaotic and confusing enough. Everything is scattered now. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator is probably in a server farm in Idaho. Toots Shor would have a place in Vegas. Frank Lloyd Wright would be designing a massive mixed-use development in Dubai. It is more than O.K. to be a little provincial if your province was the New York City of the 1950s, and it’s O.K. for us to overwrite our memories with memories as enthralling as this: “Hemingway was wearing a red plaid wool shirt, a figured wool necktie, a tan wool sweater-vest, a brown tweed jacket tight across the back and with sleeves too short for his arms, gray flannel slacks, Argyle socks, and loafers.” He was flying in from…Havana.

  Or this: “After our talk with Mrs. Fischer, we made our way to the club.” Mrs. Fischer, in case you are wondering, was the mother of Bobby. The “club” is the Manhattan Chess Club on West Sixty-fourth Street. The greatest chess player in the world was fourteen in 1957, and just twenty-one blocks uptown. You could walk over and watch him play. “For four years, I tried everything I knew to discourage him,” Mrs. Fischer tells our correspondent, with a sigh. “But it was hopeless.” In that era’s Talk of the Town, even the mothers of prodigies did not sound like the mothers of prodigies. They sounded so much better. In the pages that follow, everything does.